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Comment by np_tedious | Hacker News Reader

What's wrong with "fail fast"? An honest Theranos that failed far sooner would've done little harm. "Fail fast" is about trying new things quickly and, here's the key, getting out when they start looking bad.

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The problem with "Fail fast" as with many of these slogans is that people don't mean them. You can trust me, because my ethos is fail fast, so you know that this project must be good because I wouldn't be working on it if it weren't. It's a virtue signal. You could easily reframe "Fail Fast" as "Give up easily"- and no one thinks that's a really good thing. Similarly "Move fast and break things" could easily be restated as "Don't think about the consequences of your actions".

These are not actually good strategies, they're virtue signals that founders use to tell investors that we've got the "Silicon Valley" ethos that bought you Facebook/Google/etc.

Most people don't succeed, so in trying to replicate success, the key must be something non-obvious and counter-intuitive.

So people are always going to look for possibilities that are superficially and obviously terrible approaches, but which look like they might be the secret of success if you squint the right way.

It's not merely that these particular slogans are bad and should be eliminated, it's that the nature of the game leads people to look for and invent such things, and if we all agreed not to ever say these things again, new ones would arise. I don't think there is a general solution.

Totally agree - Theranos went on for something like a decade without any evidence they had made any sort of process breakthrough or innovation. The whole company was built on lies and bullshit. The co-founder dude who put up the initial money made that money by speculating on the dot com boom of 1999/2000 and getting out before it bust.

That's why he(she?) wrote "revisit". As in, let's get back to it, let's see why it could have been good.

Nothing inherently. Except that most great discoveries/inventions were made by people who were convinced about the fundamental validity of their idea and persevered over many iterations (rather than pivoting). Consider how many years the incandescent light bulb would have been delayed had Edison (or Swan or whoever you want to credit) had failed fast with the filaments. To me, fail-fast is a very VC-centric philosophy. It's perfectly valid if your end goal is return on investment. But if your goal is to "build something", perseverance is generally a better strategy.

If your goal as a society or whatever is to "build something" having many members who persevere is better. But on an individual basis, it usually isn't, because you'll probably fail. There's a tension between individual rationality and group rationality.

> Consider how many years the incandescent light bulb would have been delayed had Edison (or Swan or whoever you want to credit) had failed fast with the filaments.

But he did try a lot of different filament materials. It would've been really dumb to think he was going to somehow get cotton or whatever wrong material correct if he just stuck with it. Instead he had procedures and a framework to try a lot of candidates and iterate quickly.

I get this argument might not be exactly fair because I can twist it to nearly anything. But that's how maxims like "fail fast" or "haste makes waste" or "a stitch in time..." works. They still have value

AN honest Theranos would never have existed as a company.

People still laud Uber for illegal behaviour.

I don't know but people have made that saying with probably one data point and people like us want some one shot solution to every problem we have in life and that's why such quotes gather momentum. In reality these do not have any substance at all. You fail fast or fail slow, each have its advantages and disadvantages, sometimes severe, I wouldn't want to hurry and fail in my nuclear energy startup. So please take everything with huge grain of salt when it comes to preaching from the (confirmation) biased peoples.

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